CHAPTER FIVE #2
"I say you're three under par and playing the best golf of your season because you've trusted the read on every shot for twelve consecutive holes.
I say the wind is your ally and the center of the green gives you a birdie putt with zero risk of disaster.
I say the aggressive shot is beautiful and unnecessary and you don't need beautiful right now. You need disciplined."
I aim center-green.
The ball launches on a straight line, right of the flag, right of the bunker, exactly where Nerys told me to aim. The wind catches it at the apex and moves it left — smoothly, predictably, the way Nerys said it would. It lands on the green twelve feet from the hole and stops.
Twelve feet. Uphill. Slight left-to-right break.
I make the birdie putt.
I'm four under par.
I pull the ball from the cup and turn toward Nerys. She's standing at the edge of the green with the bag on her shoulder and the yardage book closed, and she's looking at me the way she looked at the course maps in her notebook — with total attention and no wasted emotion.
"That was disciplined," she says.
The word hits me like a hand on the back of my neck.
Not incredible. Not fearless. Not amazing or brilliant or electric or any of the words I've been collecting since I was fourteen years old like a woman stockpiling currency against the fear that she might one day be unremarkable.
Disciplined.
A word that means I did not do the exciting thing. I did the correct thing. And the woman standing beside the green is telling me, in her low, precise, unperformative voice, that the correct thing is worthy of praise.
My throat tightens. I nod. Walk to the seventeenth tee. My hands are steady. My breathing is even. My body feels calibrated in a way I do not recognize as myself.
I birdie seventeen from sixteen feet. I par eighteen with a textbook approach and two solid putts.
I shoot sixty-six. Five under par. The best round of my season by four strokes.
I finish the tournament tied for sixth.
·
Post-tournament. The media center is bright and noisy, and I give a twelve-minute interview that I perform on autopilot because the part of my brain that generates public-facing Tala is running fine while the rest of me is somewhere else entirely.
The somewhere else is the corridor of the Kiawah resort hotel at nine forty-seven in the evening.
I've showered. Changed into a dark silk shirt and loose trousers and bare feet because I'm not going outside and shoes feel like a commitment I can't make right now. My hair is damp. I smell like the hotel shampoo, which is aggressively botanical.
Nerys's room is three doors down. I know this because I watched her keycard flash when she opened it earlier, and my brain recorded the room number the way it records pin positions — automatically, with a precision that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with want.
I stand in the corridor. The carpet is soft. The lighting is warm. The ice machine hums around the corner.
I walk three doors.
I raise my hand to knock.
I don't knock. My hand stays in the air. My heartbeat is in my wrist. My chest. My ears.
What am I doing?
I'm standing barefoot in a hotel corridor about to knock on the door of the woman my sponsors hired to fix my career.
The woman who is seventeen years older than me and six inches taller and so controlled she makes marble look fidgety.
The woman who said disciplined in a voice that made my entire body change frequency.
What am I doing?
I'm doing the aggressive thing. The Tala thing. The thing where the excitement overwhelms the strategy and I swing before I've finished the backswing and the shot either succeeds spectacularly or destroys everything.
I should go back to my room.
I knock.
Twelve seconds. The door opens.
Nerys is in a soft gray T-shirt and dark trousers and bare feet. Her hair is loose — not pushed behind her ears, not controlled, just falling around her jaw in a way I haven't seen before. The silver streak catches the corridor light.
She doesn't look surprised. She looks like a woman who heard my footsteps three doors away and decided to answer.
"Tala."
"I played well today."
"You played intelligently today. That's better."
"Because of you."
"Because of us. That's the point of a team."
I should talk about golf. I should mention the sixteenth hole, the wind strategy, the trust I felt building through the round. I should keep this professional and warm and within the boundaries that two adults maintain when one of them pays the other to carry her equipment.
"Have you imagined kissing me?"
The question drops between us like a ball on hardpan — no bounce, no spin, just the flat, honest sound of something landing exactly where it was aimed.
Nerys's expression doesn't change. Her body does. A nearly invisible recalibration — her weight shifting backward half an inch, her right hand tightening on the door frame. The hand holding the keycard — the long fingers, the scarred thumb — presses harder against the plastic.
"Yes," she says.
The syllable is quiet and completely unadorned. No deflection. No performance. She hands me the truth the way she hands me a club selection — cleanly, without flinching from the consequences.
"So—"
"No."
"Why?"
"Because right now, you pay me. Right now, my income from this arrangement depends on your continued satisfaction with my work.
Right now, if this goes wrong and you decide I'm inconvenient, I could lose guaranteed compensation, professional reputation, and the first significant caddying contract I've accepted in three years.
" She pauses. The pause is not hesitation — it's emphasis.
"Right now, the power runs one direction and it isn't mine. "
I absorb that. Each word. I hear them the way I heard her course reads today — completely, without filtering.
She's right.
She's right the way the center-of-the-green play was right on the sixteenth. Not the answer I want. The answer the math demands.
"What if I fix that?"
"Fix what?"
"The power. The contract. Whatever Phaedra needs to make it equal. Whatever you need to make it safe. What if I restructure the whole arrangement so that you have independent representation, guaranteed pay regardless of what happens between us, and the right to walk away without losing anything?"
Nerys studies me. The corridor is quiet. Somewhere on a lower floor, a door opens and closes. The ice machine cycles off.
"Then we would have a different conversation."
She opens her door wider. She's going inside.
The evening is ending and she's drawing the line and I'm about to be standing alone in this corridor with my pulse at a hundred and forty and nothing to show for it except the knowledge that she said yes and then chose not to act on it because the professional framework isn't safe enough yet.
She turns back.
She looks at me. All of me. Slowly. Without pretending she isn't.
Her eyes start at my face — the damp hair, the jaw, the scar on my lip. They drop to my throat. The collar of the silk shirt, open to the third button. The shape of my shoulders. The rise and fall of my breathing, which is faster than I want it to be and can't seem to slow.
She's not assessing me the way she assesses a course. She's looking at me the way a woman looks at another woman when the answer is yes and the timing is not yet.
Then she steps forward.
Her hand comes to my jaw.
Those long fingers, the ones I've been watching for two weeks, the scarred thumb pressing against my cheekbone. She tilts my face up — the height difference requiring the adjustment, six inches between us, her chin above my forehead — and she holds me there.
"This is the answer to your question," she says.
She kisses me.
Not tentatively. Not cautiously. Not with the reserve I've come to associate with every controlled thing she does.